'And justice for all?' Apparently not

How’s this for 21st century justice?
You go to trial, the jury says “not guilty” but the government throws you in prison just the same.
That is Attorney General Eric Holder’s bold vision for 9/11 defendant Khalid Sheikh Mohamed’s upcoming trial in federal court. Holder has told the media that he considers the conviction guaranteed, but that if he’s wrong and the jury isn’t convinced of Mohamed’s guilt, the government will keep him locked up anyway.
In every way, this is a seriously bad idea.
It’s not that I have much sympathy for Mohamed, but what Holder’s proposing is not the way the American system is supposed to work. It’s the way the Soviet judicial system worked — staging show trials where the fate of the accused was determined in advance — but American trials are supposed to be about justice.
True, they frequently aren’t just. Guilty people get off free, innocent people rot in prison for years and the quality of your lawyer often matters more than the facts.
But for all its flaws, nobody’s found a better, fairer alternative.
Everything we know of Mohamed indicates he is indeed a terrorist and a nasty piece of work, but he still has the right to a fair trial (and if the government ignores the verdict, it isn’t one) because that right is inalienable. It’s not something our government gives us if we’re good; it’s not something government gives us at all. It’s something we’re entitled to whether our elected officials want us to have it or not.
That’s the most fundamental reason Holder and Obama are wrong on this, but it’s far from the only one.
For another, if our government gets to dispense with all the procedural protections in the trial system and never has to prove its case to a jury, innocent people will wind up in jail, guaranteed.
It happens sometimes even with those protections; strip those shields away and it will get worse. Our courts have already ruled in multiple Guantanamo Bay cases that there was no evidence to justify keeping the detainees imprisoned; the Obama administration won’t be any wiser or more accurate in deciding who’s a threat to us than the Bush administration was.
And will the government even try?
The political considerations in terrorist trials are huge, and it’s obviously safer for the White House to opt with “guilty until proven innocent” (or in Mohamed’s case, “guilty even if found innocent”) than to let anyone out. That eliminates the risk of releasing a real terrorist by mistake, and shields Obama against “soft on terror” charges (it was a loser charge for Repubs in 2006 and 2008, but Dems don’t seem to have noticed).
Some people may argue that 9/11 terrorists or Islamic terrorists or non-citizens should be an exception to the rules, but there’s no guarantee it would stay an exception.
The FBI and prosecutors have used many of the expanded anti-terrorist powers they were given post-9/11 in cases that had nothing to do with terrorism. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has said he thinks it’s Constitutional to use torture to gather information in criminal non-terrorist cases. The government already tried locking up one American citizen, Jose Padilla, without trial.
If it becomes accepted that the government can imprison accused terrorists who are found not guilty, why not accused rapists? Drug-dealers? Pedophiles? Abusive spouses and parents? Drunk drivers? Or any other category of human being we decide is the lowest of the low?
From the perspective of Washington, holding Mohamed — not to mention denying trials in other cases where a guilty verdict seems less certain — makes good sense.
It’s politically expedient, and it’s not as if anyone in the White House or Congress has to worry about the injustice. They have power, status and money; nobody’s going to put them on trial without crossing every t and dotting every i.
Keeping accused terrorists locked up is convenient, but convenience is not a good reason for denying anyone their rights.
As Martin Luther King said, injustice anywhere is a threat to justice anywhere — and even when it isn’t a threat, it’s still unjust. The guilty and the evil are entitled to their inalienable rights, just like the innocent and the good.